Just listen to the album; don’t try to think your way through it. And please: DON’T LOOK FOR LYRICAL TRANSLATIONS. If you’re wanting to understand Sigur Rós in their native Icelandic, then you’re lost already. “Ágætis byrjun,” by the various rough translations, has its meaning alternate between “victory rose“ and “new beginning.” Such songs as “Hjartað hamast (bamm bamm bamm),” “Viðar vel tl loftárasa,” and “Flugufrelsarinn” will not strike you as “Glass Onion”-style verbal puzzles, and lines like “En nú úr takt yið tímann/týndur og gleymdurheíma hjá mér” do not ring with poetic truth. And if you want to understand “en pori Þori Það ekki/frekar slekk ég á mér,” just don’t bother with listening to the album.

This is not some xenophobia at play, nor is it a open-minded initial encounter with a foreign-language album. This is because Ágætis byrjun cuts to the core necessitated desire of what music should do: not make you think. Make. You. Feel.

I’d never heard of Sigur Rós until they opened for Radiohead last year, and what little I’ve managed to hear of their first album, Von, I’ve not been impressed with (it doesn’t have the gauzy all-encompassing warmth of Ágætis byrjun). But I do know this: they’ve started to fill a hole that I’ve partially felt in my music…or at the very least, they’ve torn at the veils to show me that that hole exists. They’ve taken Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s orchestral politick hymns and focused on the triumphant humanist qualities that have emerged on occasion. They’ve taken the maudlin grandiose operas in pop-cliché clothing that Radiohead used to package, and followed the experimental path they might have gone if they didn’t feel forced by the media to make discordant “innovations.” They’ve also taken Travis’ winsome ethereal balladry, and subtracted the inane lyrical content, but retained—and expressed—all the universal malaise. And they can do this for you, because if you ignore the generous amount of Sigur Rós’ press—focusing on how they live in Iceland and they birth their music by gazing up from the cold and into the sky—once you get your hands on Ágætis byrjun, you can realize that they have no context. It’s an open slate. Ágætis byrjun is a warm soundscape that so gloriously transcends easy classification, complex classification, or any classification; I’ve managed to project the sad and melodramatic onto it, but because of an elusiveness in the music, it can represent any emotion between muted sadness and muted happiness on the human spectrum. And that’s a big sweep.

The universality strikes with nothing hugely experimental (unless you count the airy, structure-lacking songs), but instead uses a cornucopia of winsome instruments: pianos, organs, violins, tremolo, horns, flutes, choirs, quiet feedback, brushes—basically anything that can be played soft. The American “single” (which you will probably never hear on radio) “Svefn-g-englar”—along with “Starálfur,” “Flugufrelsarinn,ö and virtually every song on the album—basically take the approach of hymnal ballad clichés, and pad them with enough ambient in-between. Does it feel like an insult that you’re being presented with soft melodies in new clothing? No. It’s unassuming. It doesn’t have any context. So it’s for you to decide.

Do I think you will like the album? I’m terribly sorry, but at this moment, I would feel like nothing more than a fucking unrepentant whore if I attempted to feign objectivity here. Because Ágætis byrjun, with all that it is has suckered me, pulled me in, catered to all the stereotypical facets I want out of my music. In its most pristine, archetypal (and still prototypical), it’s a soothing passive drone; it comes up in some of the music I’ve come to hold dear as a sustained Hammond organ tone, or an open guitar chord (some of you might hold it as a church organ sound). But in the dimension of hyperbole, it represents the warmth in cold, love in desolation, hope in atrophy—it represents salvation. It’s sunshine on the back of your neck as you walk out of a cool house, it’s an insatiably good feeling in your stomach or in your head. It’s a lullaby that doesn’t make you jump for it. Instead, you simply have faith that it will always be there, being the soundtrack for any icky thoughts or feelings that may plague you in the remainder of your life—it’s the musical replacement for a mother’s “Everything will be all right.” And as long as I have it for me, I could remain blissfully unaware whether or not you like it, and be content. But this humanistic album affected me—without speaking in specifics, but in universality—and for that I should care. So I say this: listen to it, and love it.